Alan Seeger Brooke War Poems

Alan Seeger (1888 – 1916)

War Poems by Alan Seeger

• A Message to America
• You have the grit and the guts, I know...
• After an Epigram of Clement Marot
• The lad I was I longer now...
• All Thats Not Love . . .
• All that's not love is the dearth of my days...
• An Ode to Antares
• At dusk, when lowlands where dark waters glide...
• Antinous
• Stretched on a sunny bank he lay at rest...
• Ariosto. Orlando Furioso, Canto X, 91-99
• Ruggiero, to amaze the British host...
• At the Tomb of Napoleon
• I stood beside his sepulchre whose fame...
• Bellinglise
• Deep in the sloping forest that surrounds...
• Broceliande
• Broceliande! in the perilous beauty of silence and menacing shade...
• Champagne, 1914-15
• In the glad revels, in the happy fetes...
• Coucy
• The rooks aclamor when one enters here...
• Do You Remember Once . . .
• Do you remember once, in Paris of glad faces...
• El Extraviado
• Over the radiant ridges borne out on the offshore wind...
• Eudaemon
• O happiness, I know not what far seas...
• Fragments
• In that fair capital where Pleasure, crowned...
• I have a Rendezvous with Death
• I have a rendezvous with Death...
• I Loved...
• I loved illustrious cities and the crowds...
• Juvenilia, An Ode to Natural Beauty
• There is a power whose inspiration fills...
• Kyrenaikos
• Lay me where soft Cyrene rambles down...
• La Nue
• Oft when sweet music undulated round...
• Liebestod
• I who, conceived beneath another star...
• Lyonesse
• In Lyonesse was beauty enough, men say...
• Maktoob
• A shell surprised our post one day...
• Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France
• Ay, it is fitting on this holiday...
• On a Theme in the Greek Anthology
• Thy petals yet are closely curled...
• On the Cliffs, Newport
• Tonight a shimmer of gold lies mantled o'er...
• Paris
• First, London, for its myriads; for its height...
• Resurgam
• Exiled afar from youth and happy love...
• Sonnet 01
• Sidney, in whom the heyday of romance...
• Sonnet 02
• Not that I always struck the proper mean...
• Sonnet 03
• Why should you be astonished that my heart...
• Sonnet 04
• If I was drawn here from a distant place...
• Sonnet 05
• Seeing you have not come with me, nor spent...
• Sonnet 06
• Oh, you are more desirable to me...
• Sonnet 07
• There have been times when I could storm and plead...
• Sonnet 08
• Oh, love of woman, you are known to be...
• Sonnet 09
• Amid the florid multitude her face...
• Sonnet 10
• I have sought Happiness, but it has been...
• Sonnet 11
• Apart sweet women (for whom Heaven be blessed)...
• Sonnet 12
• Clouds rosy-tinted in the setting sun...
• Sonnet I
• Down the strait vistas where a city street...
• Sonnet II
• Her courts are by the flux of flaming ways...
• Sonnet III
• There was a youth around whose early way...
• Sonnet IV
• Up at his attic sill the South wind came...
• Sonnet IX
• Amid the florid multitude her face...
• Sonnet V
• A tide of beauty with returning May...
• Sonnet VI
• Give me the treble of thy horns and hoofs...
• Sonnet VII
• To me, a pilgrim on that journey bound...
• Sonnet VIII
• Oft as by chance, a little while apart...
• Sonnet X
• A splendor, flamelike, born to be pursued...
• Sonnet XI
• When among creatures fair of countenance...
• Sonnet XII
• Like as a dryad, from her native bole...
• Sonnet XIII
• I fancied, while you stood conversing there...
• Sonnet XIV
• IT may be for the world of weeds and tares...
• Sonnet XV
• Above the ruin of God's holy place...
• Sonnet XVI: Who Shall Invoke Her
• Who shall invoke her, who shall be her priest...
• Tezcotzinco
• Though thou art now a ruin bare and cold...
• The Aisne
• We first saw fire on the tragic slopes...
• The Bayadere
• Flaked, drifting clouds hide not the full moon's rays...
• The Deserted Garden
• I know a village in a far-off land...
• The Hosts
• Purged, with the life they left, of all...
• The Need to Love
• The need to love that all the stars obey...
• The Nympholept
• There was a boy -- not above childish fears...
• The Old Lowe House, Staten Island
• Another prospect pleased the builder's eye...
• The Rendezvous
• He faints with hope and fear. It is the hour...
• The Sultans Palace
• My spirit only lived to look on Beauty's face...
• The Torture of Cuauhtemoc
• Their strength had fed on this when Death's white arms...
• The Wanderer
• To see the clouds his spirit yearned toward so...
• Tithonus
• So when the verdure of his life was shed...
• To England at the Outbreak of the Balkan War
• A cloud has lowered that shall not soon pass o'er...
• Translations: Dante - Inferno, Canto XXVI
• Florence, rejoice! For thou o'er land and sea...
• Virginibus Puerisque . . .
• I care not that one listen if he lives...
• Vivien
• Her eyes under their lashes were blue pools...
• With a Copy of Shakespeares Sonnets on Leaving College
• As one of some fat tillage dispossessed...
• Written in a Volume of the Comtesse de Noailles
• Be my companion under cool arcades...

Alan Seeger was born in New York, and lived on Staten Island for the first ten years of his life. In 1900 his family moved over to Mexico for a couple of years – these Latin American experiences engrained their way into some of his later poetry.

In 1906 Seeger was accepted into Harvard and graduated in 1910 where he moved to Greenwich Village for two years, writing poetry and living as a young carefree Bohemian.

A little later Seeger lived his Bohemian lifestyle in the Latin Quarter of Paris, France, until joining the French Foreign Legion (see photograph on the right, where Seeger wears the French apparel) on August 24th, 1914 (the U.S. did not enter the war until 1917). He was eventually killed at Belloy-en-Santerre at a young age.